My current research activities are focused on advances in several fields of rapid technology development, notably wireless networks, energy systems and social networks.
The dramatic increase in demand for new capacity and higher performance has been a major issue in the design and deployment of contemporary wireless networks. The development of these capabilities is severely limited by the scarcity of two of the principal resources in wireless networks: energy and bandwidth. Emerging generations of wireless standards are addressing these issues through the use of techniques such as cooperative communications, spectrum sharing, energy harvesting, cloud processing and densification of infrastructure. One focus of our recent work in wireless networks has addressed the fundamental limits of such techniques through information theoretic and related analyses of relay and interference channels, and the role of feedback in improving communications performance in such channels. Another focus has been on the development and analysis of new signaling and networking structures, such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), designed to enable the techniques noted above. A further issue that we are addressing is the fundamental ability of the physics of the radio channel to provide security in data transmission, and the development of codes and other methods to exploit this capability.
Our work in energy systems has focused on smart grid, which has emerged as a key technology for improving the efficiency, efficacy and security of the distribution and consumption of electric power, and particularly for the integration of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power into the electricity grid. Our work in this area has focused on the use of advanced methods from communications and information technology to address several issues arising in this context, including the detection and amelioration of bad data and physical attacks on the grid, the study of privacy issues for both operators and consumers, the development of distributed algorithms for state estimation and control of the grid and the use of game theory and prospect theory to develop an understanding of the behavior of grid participants.
In the area of social networks, our work has focused on understanding and modeling the connectivity of small-world networks, and on the role of social interaction on collaborative sensing and decision-making tasks.
Preprints of recent and forthcoming publications describing this research can be found on the ArXiv website:http://arxiv.org:443/find/all/1/au:+poor_h_v/0/1/0/all/0/1
Other publications describing recent research progress in related areas can be found there as well.